Art as form

The formalist position

Against all the foregoing accounts of the function of art stands another, which belongs distinctively to the 20th century—the theory of art as form, or formalism. The import of formalism can best be seen by noting what it was reacting against: art as representation, art as expression, art as a vehicle of truth or knowledge or moral betterment or social improvement. Formalists do not deny that art is capable of doing these things, but they believe that the true purpose of art is subverted by its being made to do these things. “Art for art’s sake, not art for life’s sake” is the watchword of formalism. Art is there to be enjoyed, to be savoured, for the perception of the intricate arrangements of lines and colours, of musical tones, of words, and combinations of these. By means of these mediums it is true that objects in the world can be represented, scenes from life depicted, and emotions from life expressed, but these are irrelevant to the principal purpose of art. Indeed, art is much less adapted to the telling of a story or the representation of the world than it is to the presentation of colours, sounds, and other items in the art medium simply for their own sake.

Most people who claim to enjoy paintings, for example, enjoy them not as presentations but as representations of things and situations in life, and thus their response is not of a kind that is unique to art but one that takes them back to the emotions of life, from which they came. They could use art to take them into a realm of pure form unknown to anyone who is unacquainted with art, but instead they use it to direct them back to the feelings and situations of life. Thus, according to the formalists, these viewers miss the opportunity of being taken into a fresh world of purely aesthetic experience and get from a work only what they bring to it: familiar experiences and emotions they employ the work to recall.

What, then, should be brought from life to art? Knowledge of life’s struggles and emotions? Knowledge at least of what people are like, and what visual objects look like? Not even these things, for even they get in the way. Representation is not bad in itself, it is merely irrelevant. Only if the representation is satisfactory as form and contributes to the general abstract design can it be said to matter aesthetically.

Most formalists have directed their attention primarily to visual art. The prerequisite for appreciating this, they believe, is a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space (the last required because otherwise a cube, for example, would appear in a painting as a flat pattern and would be unable to play the architectural role intended for it). Armed with this bit of knowledge from life, they have all they need (as far as knowledge of the world outside art is concerned) for appreciating visual art. Armed with more than this, they would find their attention drawn away from the sublimities of art to the more approachable concerns of humanity (such as representation). Shorn of this extraneous knowledge and coming to painting with eyes innocent of extraneous concepts, the viewer could then be in a position to look at what painting presents directly to his vision—complex arrangements of forms and colours—which, for reasons thus far unexplained, have the capacity to move the recipient deeply with emotions utterly alien to the emotions of life.

The formalist’s account of music runs along similar lines: not only representation (program music) is excluded but so is the entire realm of human feeling—not the feeling that the contemplation of pure form can give but only the feelings of life, such as love or terror. As to literature and all those arts in which words play a part (song, opera, drama, cinema), the formalist position would seem to be impossible, and indeed formalists have seldom attempted to extend their theory to literature. The medium of literature is words and sentences, and words and sentences are not merely noises but noises with meanings, and these meanings inevitably have to do with the objects, actions, qualities, and situations of life. As sound, literature is a poor thing—as a complex of meanings, it can be profound and beautiful. Take these away, and literature could cease to be. Literature does have formal properties—a drama can be as tightly knit as a fugue or a symphony—but the appreciation of it can never consist of these formal properties alone, and the reason lies in the very nature of the medium. It is the role of words to indicate images and meanings and emotions, and these are the stuff of life—therefore verbal art is inescapably humanistic. Whatever sensory beauty words have in their sounds is slight and secondary; not so with painting, where colour, line, and space have a beauty all their own and need stand for nothing outside themselves to satisfy the eye.

What, then, are the specific qualities in works of art that the formalist is seeking? Most formalists have held that a partial account can be given of these but that, in the end, the presence of the qualities must be felt intuitively and cannot be described. Accounts of formal qualities in works of art go back as far as Aristotle’s Poetics, written in the 4th century bce, and usually include (though sometimes in different terminology) the following as principal ingredients:

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, oil on canvas by Rembrandt van Rijn, …

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Organic unity

A work of art must have what Aristotle called “a beginning, a middle, and an end”; it must be unified, it must “hang together” as one entity. Everything, of course, has some degree of unity or other. Even a collection of things, such as a woodpile, has some unity inasmuch as it can correctly be called one thing: it is a collection, but it is a single collection. But the unity desired in works of art is much greater than this: it is more like the unity of the higher organisms in which every part functions not independently of the others but interdependently with them, and it is this interdependency of the parts that constitutes an organic unity. Take away one part, and the remainder of the parts fail to function as before. This is only approximately true of organisms: without a heart or a brain a person could not continue to exist (and the activity of the other organs would cease), but a person without an ear or a toe surely would. Philosophers of art have often noted that the purest examples of organic unity in the universe are not organisms but works of art: here the interdependency of parts often achieves a state of such perfection that it could often be said, of a melody or a sonnet, that if this note (or word) were not there, in just the place that it is, the effect on the entire remainder of the melody or poem would be disastrous.

This principle is the natural accompaniment of the first one. A blank wall has unity but no variety and is not long worth contemplating. Nor is there any triumph in achieving unity at so small a price. The work of art must hold in suspension (as it were) a great diversity of elements and unify them—the greater the complexity that is integrated into a unity, the greater the achievement. This fact is so universally recognized that the two criteria are often stated as one, unity-in-diversity, or variety-in-unity.

Very many great works of art are much less than perfect organic unities (which is another way of saying that unity-in-variety is not the only criterion for excellence in works of art). Particularly in long poems or novels or operas, some parts are clearly more important than the others, though contributing to the whole, and some parts may be simply “padding.” One could hardly allege that Homer’s entire epic the Iliad is an organic unity and that if (for example) the catalog of ships were removed the entire epic would be ruined (some even say it would be improved). In Dostoyevsky’s novels there are whole chapters that are unnecessary from the point of view of relevance to the rest of the story, and, aesthetically (though perhaps not in other ways), these are a pure excrescence. In most works of art there are high spots and low spots, and there is a great deal of elasticity as to what could follow what. But in spite of this, unity-in-variety is quite universally recognized as a criterion for artistic excellence. If a drama consisted of two plots that never connected with one another, even at the end, such a play would be condemned at once for lack of unity; a work of art is never praised for being disjointed or disunified, though it might be praised in spite of being disunified.

Theme and thematic variation

In many works of art there is a dominant theme, or motif, which stands out and upon which the other portions are centred. This theme is then varied in different ways in other portions of the work. This is a special case of unity-in-variety. If every line in a work of music or literature were entirely novel and different from the other ones, there would be enormous diversity but no unifying connecting links, and if there were simply a repetition of the initial theme or of entire sections of the work (as sometimes happens when a composer does not know how to develop the thematic material with which he has begun), there would be unity but no variety. Both unity and variety are preserved by having central themes with other material that is related to them (unity) but not identical with them (variety).

Development, or evolution

In works of temporal art, each part develops or evolves into the next, each part being necessary to the succeeding part, so that if an earlier part were altered or deleted, all the subsequent parts would have to be altered in consequence. If a portion of Act IV could be interchanged with a portion of Act II without loss of effect, the principle of development has not been observed, for then the material occurring in between would not have made any difference.

The arrangement of the various parts should be balanced, usually in contrasting ways (the adagio movement coming between two faster movements, for example). In painting, there should be a balance between the right and left halves of the canvas. The many ways, other than simple mechanical symmetry (“for every item on the left there should be an item on the right,” which soon becomes monotonous), in which a painting may have variety and yet retain balance are too complex to be discussed other than in a book of art criticism. But in its simplest essentials, the principle is acknowledged by everyone: the person who places all the furniture on one half of the living room while leaving the other half empty finds the arrangement aesthetically displeasing because the room lacks balance.

There are many descriptions of principles of form in art, which differ from one another in their terminology more than in their final outcome. In general, however, few if any of these principles would be denied (only the detail of their formulations might be) by most philosophers of art. Why certain principles of form are found satisfactory and others are not is a fascinating psychological question, leading back to a discussion (necessarily vague in the present state of knowledge) of the nature of the human organism and the discriminatory powers of the human mind. But however obscure the explanation, the facts of the case seem clear enough: certain formal principles in art must be observed, and, to the degree that they are ignored or violated, aesthetic catastrophe occurs: the work of art cannot evoke our interest or sustain it long once it is initiated.

Although a discussion of these formal principles is helpful particularly to those who have little native sense of form and who want “to know what to look for” in art, they are sufficiently vague so that many critics can agree on a formal principle, such as unity, and yet disagree on the degree to which a specific work possesses it.

In addition, these principles are far from complete: a work of art can possess unity and the other requirements in high degree and yet be unsuccessful even as form. The requirements listed seem only to have skimmed the surface. Yet what more is required to distinguish a formally correct but dull work of art from a brilliant one seems to defy precise analysis. Moreover, the majority of critics who have assented to these principles are not formalists: they have acknowledged and even insisted on the great importance of form in works of art, but they have not alleged, as formalists do, that these principles constitute the sole criteria of excellence in works of art. They have held that the fulfillment of formal criteria counts as a necessary condition for artistic excellence but not a sufficient condition.

Pragmatic theories of art

There are theories of art that differ from one another in what they allege to be the real purpose or function of art but are at one with each other in the belief that art is a means to some end, whether that end be the titillation of the senses or the communization of the nations of the world or the conversion of humankind to belief in God or the improved moral beliefs or moral tone of the reader or viewer. In every case, the work of art is considered as a means to some end beyond itself, and hence what counts in the final analysis is not the nature of the work of art itself but its effects upon the audience—whether those effects be primarily sensory, cognitive, moral, religious, or social.

Hedonistic theories of art

According to one kind of theory, the function of art is to produce just one kind of effect upon its audience: pleasure. It may also inform or instruct, represent or express, but first and foremost it must please. The more pleasure it gives, the better the art.

If the theory is left in this simple form, it yields the result that glossy and superficial works and those containing nothing difficult or obscure are the best works of art. Thus, on the hedonistic account, King Lear might come out far behind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, or Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” in view of the difficulty of comprehending Shakespeare by many people and the pleasant, easy lilting quality of Longfellow’s poem; similarly, a simple ditty might come out ahead of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. True, Shakespeare and Bach might produce more pleasure in the long run since their works have endured through more centuries, but, on the other hand, the simple works can be apprehended and enjoyed by vastly more people.

In any case, the theory has often been amended to read “aesthetic pleasure” rather than simply “pleasure”—thus placing great importance on exactly how the term “aesthetic” is to be defined. The definition of this troublesome term is beyond the scope of this article (seeaesthetics); it will simply be said here that no quick and easy way of distinguishing aesthetic pleasures from other pleasures will suffice for the task at hand. If it is said, for example, that aesthetic pleasure consists in satisfaction taken in the contemplation of sensuous particulars (tones, colours, shapes, smells, tastes) for their own sake—that is, for no further end and without ulterior motive—then one confronts the fact that as much pleasure may be taken in single smells and tastes for their own sakes, without any reference beyond them, as may be taken in the most complex works of art. For that matter, pleasure in playing a game (one not played for money) is pleasure in doing something for its own sake, as is the pleasure of robbing a house if it is done not for money but for “kicks.” If something is found pleasurable, ordinarily the pleasure is what one wants from it, not something else beyond it.

Moreover, if it is said that a work of art should be a means toward pleasure, that is treading suspiciously near to the opposed view that art should not be a means to an end but an end in itself. If someone says, “Why do you go jogging every morning for three miles? Because you feel the exercise is good for you?” and another person answers, “No, not that at all, I just enjoy doing it,” this would ordinarily and quite sensibly be taken as saying that he did not do exercise as a means toward an end but as an end in itself. If something is done just because it is enjoyed, in common parlance this would be taken to be “doing it as an end in itself”; if one objected, “No, I’m not doing it as an end in itself, I’m doing it as a means toward the enjoyment I’ll get out of it,” his reply would be considered sophistical, for doing it for enjoyment’s sake is precisely what is ordinarily meant (or one thing that is ordinarily meant) by the statement that a thing is being done for its own sake.

In any case, the effect of great works of art upon a reader or viewer or listener can hardly be described as merely hedonistic. No one would presumably wish to deny that art can and should give us pleasure, but few would wish to assert that pleasure is all that it should give us. If one were to ask, “How did viewing Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ affect you?” and the reply was, “I found it pleasant,” we would conclude that his reaction to the painting was, to say the least, inadequate. Great art may please; it may also move, shock, challenge, or change the lives of those who experience it deeply. Pleasure is only one of many kinds of effects it produces.